A roommate found her crying and lent her $1,000 to stay in college: years later Bezos' ex-wife gave away $26 billion

Every college friendship has a defining moment. Usually it's holding someone's hair back, or covering their share of the pizza, or lying to a RA. For MacKenzie Scott and her Princeton roommate, it was a thousand dollars, handed over in the late '80s to a sophomore who was crying because she couldn't afford to stay in school.

That sophomore is now worth around $34 billion and is giving it away at a pace that makes professional philanthropists look like they're on a smoke break.

The dorm room part

The roommate was Jeannie Tarkenton, and when she found Scott in tears over a $1,000 gap between her and a Princeton degree, she got her dad to loan Scott the money, as Tarkenton told the Associated Press. Her retrospective take on the whole thing is the most college-best-friend sentence ever printed:

"I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney," Tarkenton said. That's the roommate lottery, and Scott won it.

Scott stayed. She graduated in 1992, studied under Toni Morrison (as one does), later wrote an award-winning novel, and along the way married a guy named Jeff who was starting an online bookstore. You know how that part goes: Amazon, divorce in 2019, roughly 4% of the company, and then — the plot twist nobody on the Forbes list saw coming — she started giving it away. No galas, no naming rights, no strings. Fortune reports her giving push has reached the $26 billion range, with historically Black colleges, public health groups, and hundreds of nonprofits waking up to surprise money like it's Christmas and the elf is a novelist.

The receipts

Decades later, Scott wrote an essay about why she gives, and listed the kindnesses she thinks about every time she signs something enormous. The dentist who fixed her tooth for free. And the roommate, who, in Scott's words,

"acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars" — the urge being the whole point. Nobody ran the numbers. Somebody just helped.

And here's the part that makes the story almost suspiciously cinematic:

• Tarkenton, having watched what $1,000 did for one broke, brilliant student, later founded Funding U — a company that lends to low-income college students who don't have a cosigner or a rich safety net;
• Funding U has since put about $80 million into roughly 8,000 students;
• And Scott, per the AP, has now invested in her old roommate's company. The loan came back. It just took thirty-something years and grew several extra zeros.

A thousand dollars. One crying sophomore. Do with that information whatever your group chat needs you to do with it.